Edward Alden

Expertise

Bio

Edward Alden is the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), specializing in U.S. economic competitiveness. In addition, Mr. Alden is the director of the CFR Renewing America publication series and co-author of the recent CFR Working Paper Managing Illegal Immigration to the United States. The former Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times, his work focuses on immigration and visa policy, and on U.S. trade and international economic policy.

Mr. Alden was the project co-director of the 2011 Independent Task Force on U.S. Trade and Investment Policy, which was co-chaired by former White House chief of staff Andrew Card and former Senate majority leader Thomas Daschle. He was also the project director for the 2009 Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy.

Mr. Alden is the author of the book The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11 (HarperCollins), which was named a 2009 finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for nonfiction writing. The judges called it "a masterful job of comprehensive reporting, fair-minded analysis, and structurally sound argumentation."

Mr. Alden was previously the Canadian bureau chief for the Financial Times based in Toronto, and before that was a reporter at the Vancouver Sun specializing in labor and employment issues. He also was the managing editor of the newsletter Inside U.S. Trade, widely recognized as the leading source of reporting on U.S. trade policies. He has won several national and international awards for his reporting. Mr. Alden has done numerous TV and radio appearances as an analyst on political and economic issues, including NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, McLaughlin Group, NPR, the BBC, CNN, and MSNBC. His work has also appeared in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the Japan Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. He is the coauthor, with Franz Schurmann, of Democratic Politics and World Order, a monograph published by Berkeley's Institute of International Studies in 1990.

Mr. Alden holds a master's degree in international relations from the University of California, Berkeley, and pursued doctoral studies before returning to a journalism career. He also has a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of British Columbia. He was the winner of numerous academic awards, including a Mellon fellowship in the humanities and a MacArthur Foundation graduate fellowship.

Restoring America's Economic Competitiveness

Over the past half century, the United States has gone from being a relatively self-sufficient economy to one that is far more deeply integrated into the global economy. That transformation means that the prosperity and ultimately the security of the United States now depends far more on America's success in global markets. Yet government policy, especially at the federal level, has not adapted well to this new reality. In my forthcoming book, Competitiveness: America's Obsession and Why We Have Done So Little About It, I argue that the federal government has repeatedly failed to respond effectively to the competitive challenges of this new era on such issues as trade, currency, worker re-training, education, infrastructure and support for innovation. I am also pursuing these topics through the Renewing America Publication Series, which includes policy papers and progress reports on critical issues related to the competitiveness of the U.S. economy, blog posts, and a roundtable series on American competitiveness.

This project is made possible through the support of the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation.

Immigration Reform: Prospects and Challenges

The U.S. government has tried and failed over the past decade to reform its outdated and ineffective policies on immigration. The current system, based largely on a law passed by Congress in 1965, fails to attract immigrants needed by the U.S. economy and is ineffective at discouraging unauthorized immigration. Beginning with my book The Closing of the American Border on how the September 11 attacks affected U.S. immigration policies and continuing through the Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy, for which I was the project director, I have been examining the substantive challenges of creating an immigration system that boosts the U.S. economy while securing its borders. One critical piece of that challenge is better data and research that improves the measurement of enforcement effectiveness, and enhances public understanding of what enforcement can and cannot do to prevent unauthorized immigration. My work on immigration includes a recent CFR Working Paper on border enforcement, speeches, articles and congressional testimony related to immigration reform, as well as a roundtable series on U.S. immigration and visa policies.

This project is made possible through the support of the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation.

Renewing America

Is the U.S. trade deficit a problem for the United States? If so, does it reflect competitiveness problems that are in part due to trade policies, or is it caused by factors that have nothing to do with trade policies? What are the proper policy responses?

The United States once had the world’s most efficient market for matching willing workers with available jobs. As recently as 2000, scarcely one-in-ten unemployed workers had been out of a job for more than six months, compared with more than half of unemployed workers in the major European nations.

In a new column for The Washington Post, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow Edward Alden makes the case that in order for President Obama to be effective, he needs to forget the golfer mentality that he has developed during his time in office and bring back the basketball-style hustle that helped him win the White House.

Renewing America

Each year, U.S. state and local governments waste tens of billions of taxpayer dollars competing to lure or retain business investment, with little impact on business behavior. Edward Alden and Rebecca Strauss lay out incremental steps for curbing the subsidy war, beginning with greater disclosure and cost-benefit analyses, and building up to a multistate agreement that creates strong disincentives for continuing subsidies.

Each year, state and local governments in the United States spend more than $80 billion, or roughly 7 percent of their total budgets, on tax breaks and subsidies to attract investments from auto companies, movie producers, aircraft makers and other industries. Edward Alden and Rebecca Strauss explore the possiblity of ending such compensation.

The Obama administration has embraced the most ambitious agenda on trade and investment liberalization in the past two decades, but more must be done to remove trade barriers in services, which is where the United States is most competitive, according to Ted Alden.

A preview of world events in the coming week from CFR.org: Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe tours Southeast Asia; Mali and Cambodia hold elections; and Congress continues immigration and spending debates.

Edward Alden, Bryan Roberts, and John Whitley argue that the Obama administration can gain the trust of Congress and a skeptical public only by developing and publicly reporting real measures on the effectiveness of border enforcement.

American policymakers have long been concerned about the eroding U.S. advantage in educating science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students. With much of the assembly work for lucrative high-technology products having moved to Asia, future U.S. prosperity depends increasingly on innovating new products and techniques—innovation that requires training (or importing) a new generation of scientists and engineers.

Edward Alden testifies before the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on how Congress and the Obama administration can use data to improve the effectiveness of border enforcement policies and tactics.

Renewing America

Globalization refers to the increasing ease with which goods, services, capital and people can move across the world, which has been accelerated by advances in technology and government policies to reduce barriers. In terms of reducing poverty in as many countries as possible, there is no question that globalizationcontinues to be beneficial, even after the 2008 financial crisis. Poverty continues to fall worldwide at a rapid rate, and countries most integrated into the world economy have seen the biggest reductions in poverty. But it is also true that even before the crisis, the gains from globalization were not spread evenly. Though millions have been lifted out of poverty and everyone benefits from cheaper consumer goods and the opening of new export markets, there are still winners and losers.

At this Princeton University event, "Immigration Policy, Deportations and National Security," Edward Alden discusses the changed relationship between U.S. national and border security after the attacks on September 11, 2001.